universesandboxfandomcom-20200214-history
October 19, 2010
'Summary' *Controls to add new bodies more powerful and easier to use. *Planet trails now draw longer on fast computers. *Added new tools to make editing UBOX files easier. *Lots of bug fixes and other improvements. Major *Major improvements to make adding new bodies, easier and more powerful: **Add multiple bodies to the simulation without having to click the icon in the add panel for each. **New ability to set the velocity of a placed body by dragging the mouse after you click to place it and velocity can be relative to the focused body. **Set the height of a body by dragging when you place a body in auto orbit mode. *Added File Tools for easy extraction and packaging when manual editing UBOX files. Press Alt+T to show the new window or find the link under "New" from the main menu. *Trails will now automatically lengthen as long as the frame rate isn't dramatically impacted. You can disable this by un-checking "Auto Length" in the View panel. Notable Changes *Added Ambient light slider. *Velocity arrows can now be dragged to adjust the overall speed of a body. *Bodies can now have negative mass. This may cause strange results with collisions and the orbital element values. *Launch body mode (on the add panel) now indicated by a crosshair cursor. *Improved the organization and labeling of the options on the physical properties tab. *Improved the accuracy of the calculations for the habitable zone around stars. *Rotate body rings now always visible regardless of distance. *Added simple LOD system for stars: Stars now become a flat billboard when smaller than a few pixels on screen. This also improves the look of stars from a far distance. *Height of body from grid indicators added when placing bodies. *Added text box and preset values to background brightness slider under Screen Option on the View panel. *Reload sim, load new sim, and window mode toggle buttons now visible when you hover over the open menu (...) button. *Deleting galaxies now deletes associated dust. *Added on-screen delete button to properties panel for group selections. *Added presets for time step text box. *Screenshots now saved when you release the PrintScreen button on your keyboard (in addition to F12). Press is not detected (only release) because of a limitation of the Windows OS for this key. Other Changes *Minor improvement to the accuracy of the size of impact marks made by asteroids (now based on the crater diameter formula proposed by Gene Shoemaker). *Improved internal handling of dust in preparation for adding a dust saving feature in a future update. *Universe Sandbox will no longer ask if you want to exit when you end its task from the Task Manager or if you're shutting down or restarting windows. *Improved the startup settings of the Alpha Centauri simulation. *Launch body icon now a crosshair. *Update to launch icon in the new body panel. *Made internal changes to how multiple body selection is handled. *System center focus point now smoothed when adding new planets that used to cause a visible camera jump. *Internal changes to the way materials are handled. *Added an imaging processing library, AForge, that will be used for live texture manipulation in a future update. *Minor tweaks to increase dust creation on collisions of bodies. *Updated the 'Auto Orbit' command to use the same function as the 'Orbit Parent' code when multiple objects are selected (this makes more perfect orbits). *Removed body viability toggle from view panel. Fixes *Fixed problem with planets not showing up or appearing as a star field on lower end graphics cards. This fix resulted in a slight speed improvement for new lighting system overall. *Fixed problem with Habitable Zone not updating when you change a star's luminosity. *Universe Sandbox no longer beeps when using an Alt+key combination (like Alt+T or Alt+Enter). *Fixed crash when typing non-numbers into the Trail segment text box. *Ambient light now affects dust (when turned on). *Fixed problem with Mass, Diameter, Radius text boxes not automatically updating when typing in values. *Fixed problem that caused body to disappear if you set its mass to zero. *Fixed problem with text boxes not losing focus when Enter or Tab hit if mouse was over a text box arrow or popup list. *Fixed ability to toggle labels and highlights independently of body viability. *Fixed problem with stars not displaying at all if no mass data is available. *Fixed problem when normalizing zero length vectors. *Fixed crash when trying to box select a landing point. *Fixed problem with moving bodies in the screen area to the right of the tabs. *Surface view can now be triggered by zooming in with the keyboard (and no longer just the mouse wheel). *Fixed problems with hiding a body when the cursor is over a UI element.